Investigating the Relationship Between Built Environment Characteristics and Pedestrian Risk Perception: A Comparative Analysis Across Urban Contexts

Understanding the built environment is essential for explaining road safety outcomes, particularly through individuals’ perceptions of their surroundings, which are linked to perceived travel risk and play an important role in pedestrian decision-making. However, the heterogeneous effects of the built environment across contexts remain insufficiently understood and require further investigation. Thus, this study aims to investigate how perceived built environment attributes are associated with perceived travel risk and whether these associations differ across urban contexts, with specific variation in land-use contexts. Data were collected using questionnaires administered at pedestrian crossings in Bangkok, and ordinal regression was employed for the analysis. The results indicate that some factors are consistently significant across contexts, while others show significance in specific contexts. In particular, land use mix as diversity and traffic speed are among the variables that are consistently significant across multiple contexts. Overall, the findings suggest variation in the patterns of association between built environment attributes and perceived travel risk across contexts. These results provide useful insights for urban and transport planners regarding the role of environmental design and allocation in promoting safer pedestrian environments, thereby contributing to the development of a sustainable transport system by enhancing pedestrian safety and prioritizing pedestrians in planning.